Jumbo, Horseless Fire-Engine (1897) Online

Fire engine companies racing their ways through the streets towards a conflagration were a standard bit of film from this period: fire companies in Buffalo, New York and Quebec (on sleigh runners) were available. Evenually, Edwin S. Porter would edit a bunch of them into one of his early masterpieces, THE LIFE OF AN American FIREMAN.

This one, one of the early productions of the American Mutoscope Company, which would evolve -- not mutate -- into the Biograph Company where D.W. Griffith would reign for five years, becoming the leading single director of motion pictures for more than a decade, this has a fairly important place in the history of film, but except for its lack of horses, is a fairly standard example of the genre.